Evernote lets you save everything, right? Notes, images, audio files, and all, just packed willy nilly into one of a hundred or so notebooks. What happens when you need to find your stuff again? It’s the essential problem of all sorts of electronic storage, from email to to-do lists. Simple search strings are easy enough, but what if you need more esoteric searches, like, “that note with the checkbox that I wrote up last week?”

Luckily, Evernote makes it easy to search through all our notes and notebooks for just the right stuff. Here are a few of them to help you get the most out of Evernote, search style.

todo:*: type this into the search field at the top of Evernote, and you’ll get all the notes that include checkboxes (which can be added in the Format menu).

intitle:If you type this, then a keyword, you’ll search for all notes that have that keyword in the title of your notes.

any: will find notes with any of the search terms included, rather than ones that match all the search terms.

-tag: will find all notes without the tag specified.

created: and updated: searches will find the notes created on or updated on the specified date. The date needs to be formatted with the four digit year, two digit month, and two digit day (YYYYMMDD), so a typical search would look like “created:20130319’ for all notes created yesterday.

notebook: lets you restrict your search to a specific notebook, which can be helpful if you’re not currently in that notebook. Simply type a search that says, “notebook:TITLE KEYWORD” to search. For example, “notebook:home dogs” will search my notebook called “home” for any entry that contains the word, “dogs.”

Once you’ve searched for something often enough, though, it’s time to save your search. Type in your search term, make sure it gets the results you want, and then click on the Edit menu to choose Find, then Save Search. Give it a nice, plain-english name (Notes With Checklists, for example), and then you’ll see it every time you click on the Search field at the top right of the Evernote window, down near the bottom, under Saved Searches.